Every Hesperian, in fact, considered solely with reference to this bodily organism, leads a periodical life. The length of this period is not absolutely fixed, but it may be taken on an average at one hundred years, which may be conveniently divided into three sections, which may be respectively named as stationary, senescent, and juvenescent. For example, if we take a person who has just reached the apparent age of twenty years, his organic life will proceed somewhat as follow:—For the next twenty years he or she shows no outward and visible sign of change; but, at the end of this first or stationary period, traces of departing youth begin to manifest themselves. This process goes on for forty years, much in the same way as is the case with the human race on earth; and, at the end of this period, which we call senescent, the person has, in external form, all the look of a man or woman sixty years old. At or about this time a crisis in life takes place. This crisis is marked by the patient falling into a sort of stupor or trance, in which he usually continues for about seven days. On awakening from this trance he resumes his ordinary life, apparently under the same conditions as before. But the conditions are not the same. It soon becomes plain that the trance has wrought some mysterious change in his powers of bodily life. At the date of his awakening the last section of the periodical life, called the juvenescent, begins. Change both in external form and bodily activity proceeds, but it proceeds in a reversed direction, so that at the end of ten years the man of sixty, instead of being promoted to the rank of a septuagenarian, has all the appearance of a man of fifty; ten years more bring him to forty, and so on, till the limit of twenty is reached again, and the stationary stage sets in once more. Thus the cycle of one hundred years is completed—twenty years stationary, forty senescent, forty juvenescent. It should be remembered that these numbers only give averages; they vary in different cases within limits of a few years, nor are they, even for one and the same person, quite rigidly fixed. So the reader must not suppose that those who happen to be of the same apparent age at any one given date, will evermore preserve the same chronological relation to each other. It appears at once from the consideration of this cyclical law, that about one-half of the population of the planet are (apparently) over, and the other half under, the age of thirty-five years. Still it must never be forgotten that this cycle of events affects the corporeal existence exclusively. Mental power is in no way under its control. Although it is true that, during the senescent period, both the desire and the capacity for active bodily exertion alike decline, there is no abatement whatever in the intellectual energy, or the slightest failure in the faculty of memory.